Tag: genealogy

I decided a few days ago that I would record every book I finished reading in 2018 and say something about each. As it turns out, this book, It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, 2017), a Christmas gift from My Dear One, went faster…

This was the branch that most frightened me, the one most perfectly positioned to do irreparable harm to the monument. Lower and smaller branches had already been removed, opening space around the slender column surmounted by its neoclassical urn. Four of us—two on the ground, two in the tree—studied the weight of the limb, its…

It wasn’t the wedding my heart yearns for. That wedding must wait until my Tattooed Boy is wrapped in love by some young woman who loves him and his family the way he will no doubt love her and hers. No, this was the nuptials of Young James and His Katie, friends since Middle School,…

In genealogy, I have found, it is always easier to see a connection than prove one, to imagine a family than establish one, to design a tree rather than allow it to grow. When we attempted to track down my Dear One’s Lithuanian progenitors, for instance, an administrator at the National Archives in Vilnius sniffed…

Well we traveled from Maryland to Lithuania to learn more about my Dear One’s progenitors and all we discovered was that his maternal great-grandmother’s name was “Prana” not “Orene” (as it appeared to my eye in a scribble on a ship’s manifest). Apparent that “O” was a Cyrillic “P.” Anyway, it makes perfect sense: great-granny…